Before imaging the corrupted filesystem to a file on another hard drive, I decided to dry-run ddrescue (throwing rescued output to /dev/null) just to see how much data is unreadable:

# ddrescue -d -b 4096 -r 3 -f /dev/sda1 /dev/null sda1.log

In the end it took 3 days to finish. Now I'm ready to make a real image, but I don't want to wait another 3 days until it finishes. But, luckily because I have a logfile, is it possible to force ddrescue to rescue only the good sectors and do not touch bad ones?

Having read some documentation, I've came up with the following idea:

# ddrescue -d -b 4096 --fill=+ /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1.img sda1.log

Will this work? Is there another (preferred) way of rereading only good sectors?

I thought it didn't even try to reread at all by default... In fact, you told it to retry 3 times, -r 3. -n may also save time, although I guess it won't try to get as much data as possible.
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njsgJan 10 '13 at 12:09

So that's why I came up with the idea of using --fill=+ option ("fill mode")
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evaldazJan 10 '13 at 12:17

I'm talking about Before imaging the corrupted filesystem to a file on another hard drive...

As when a disk drive come to be corrupted, corruption are generally growing each time you try to access your drive.

So the good way to rescue a broken drive is to make an image by copying whole disk from begin to end in one uninterrupted operation!. After that: unplug the disk drive and store them quietly. As: less you touch the broken drive, more chance you have to restore something.

As each time mechanical access to broken material could make some more damages, the log you're become from your last operation is not a reference for knowing wich block are damaged now.

I personally, don't use ddrescue. I use dd from a while and this tool make all I need: